Switched-On Bach outsold every classical album that had come before it. In 1968, composer Wendy Carlos performed Bach pieces on Dr. Robert Moog‘s early analog synthesizer systems and convinced a skeptical Columbia Records to release the recorded result. Switched-On Bach shattered expectations. It reached number one on the pop charts the following year, and spawned a glut of imitations. Most importantly, though, Switched-On Bach exposed a mass audience to an entirely new palette of electronic sounds. Among those radicalized by the recordings was Keith McMillen. “I lusted after control of those sounds,” he said. “Being a guitar player at the time, they just weren’t available.” McMillen’s guitar wouldn’t sound like a Moog, but synthesizers lacked the gestural sensitivity of stringed and acoustic instruments. In essence, the instrument builder’s three-decade career has sought to give electronic sounds the expressive physical interface that he cherished in a guitar – and usher in a new musical movement in the process.

At the West Berkeley headquarters of Keith McMillen Instruments, a company founded by its namesake in 2005, about fifteen employees labor to solve the problem posed by Switched-On Bach. Programmers rattle computer keyboards in one nook, while soldering irons flicker in two cluttered engineering rooms. Upstairs, there’s a tidy space where Matt Hettich, the company’s product specialist, demonstrates gear. Like most of the company’s employees, Hettich began working at KMI after graduating from the music program at Mills College in Oakland, where he wrote about electronic music performance for his master’s thesis. In the demo room, he showed off two of the company’s recent devices, QuNeo and QuNexus. They were connected to a computer, modular effects processors, and synthesizers produced by the local companies Dave Smith and Oberheim.

In practice, most musicians use these devices to control MIDI – the digital information produced by computers that constitutes sounds. The QuNeo, which raised eleven times its crowdfunding goal for initial manufacturing in 2012, is the size of an iPad, with raised pads in a variety of shapes. The QuNexus is distinguished from the QuNeo by its shape, which is similar to a keyboard, and its ability to control analog as well as digital sound. Through the company’s software, users assign every pad a specific sound. For the QuNeo, users can assign different sounds to the four corners of every pad.

Beneath the device’s polyurethane exterior rests Smart Fabric, a malleable textile with integrated digital parts. KMI was the first company to use Smart Fabric for instrument design, and McMillen worked personally with a local manufacturer to refine the material. Used in almost all KMI devices, Smart Fabric provides the sensitivity that McMillen sought in electronic interfaces since first hearing Switched-On Bach. Smart Fabric makes KMI devices sensitive to the velocity at which a user strikes each pad, the location within each pad that a user strikes, and the pressure that a user continues to apply after striking. In addition to assigning sounds through KMI software, users can manipulate the parameters of how such physical gestures affect the sounds. Smart Fabric takes live electronic music from an activity akin to typing on a laptop all the way to a physically expressive performance. For instance, the pad’s pressure sensitivity can be programmed to shift the pitch of a given note to mimic a guitarist who stretches a string – and much more.

Hettich explained the devices with exacting technical precision, like an engineer speaking to an electronic musician. His delivery was a reflection of KMI’s core consumer group: innovative musicians seeking to push their instruments’ sonic and expressive limits. Like McMillen himself, many users arrive at KMI gear hoping to defy electronic music’s limited response to physical gestures. The guitar iconoclast Adrian Belew uses a QuNeo to manipulate an array of effects kept in what he calls the Magic Closet. Other users include the experimentalist Dan Deacon, members of the Anticon hip-hop collective, and producers working with acts such as Skrillex and The Weeknd. The crew behind hip-hop artist Childish Gambino‘s live show even uses KMI devices to control lighting and visuals. The theme that echoes throughout artist testimonials about KMI devices is relieved frustration. What seemed impossible, their praise goes, actually isn’t.

McMillen built his first piece of gear – a guitar amplifier – at the age of ten. “I couldn’t afford one,” he said. “I was happy to make something that didn’t electrocute me and made the guitar louder.” Throughout high school, he played in bands and pondered the possibilities of creating an interface for instruments and computers. At the University of Chicago, he took composition courses and earned an engineering degree in acoustics. Attracted to the musical and technological innovation of Bay Area synthesizer luminary Donald Buchla and pioneering institutions like the San Francisco Tape Music Center, McMillen moved to town in 1979.

That year, he founded Zeta Music. The company rose to prominence for producing electric violins and modules to synthesize string sounds. Laurie Anderson, the composer behind 1982’s surprise pop hit O Superman, commissioned an electric violin. In 1992, Zeta made an electric viola at the request of the Kronos Quartet. In 1998, Zeta’s electric violin graced the cover of Playboy magazine’s Sex and Music issue. Zeta enabled string players to amplify their sound and retain the instrument’s timbre. It also reversed the process by synthesizing the sound of string instruments electronically. Though the company practically invented and dominated a new instrument market, it didn’t quite fulfill McMillen’s lifelong goals quite like his work under the KMI banner.

In 2004, McMillen established the nonprofit organization BEAM with the stated goal of fostering a new musical movement called NuRoque. The name referred to the seventeenth-century emergence of Baroque music, which McMillen considered an important revolutionary period because new technology expanded composers’ creative possibilities. McMillen thought that the help of computers in composition – and collaboration – was underexplored. The line of thought created a personifying habit, where components are said to “talk” to one another and “understand” the physical expression of human operators.

“If you’re focused on building tools, it’s very different from using them,” McMillen said. Under the BEAM banner, McMillen founded TrioMetrik to perform NuRoque. A typical TrioMetrik performance featured McMillen on guitar, an electric violinist, and an electric stand-up bassist, all flanked by monitors. Computers interpreted the string-playing in real time, then provided visual feedback, which the performers used in turn to influence the parameters of their improvisation. The goal was to spontaneously collaborate in tandem with computer systems.

TrioMetrik toured rigorously for two years before McMillen encountered more problems to engineer his way out of. The equipment was too large and too costly; these obstacles pivoted him back to starting his current instrument company. Plus, his long-standing dream of being able to control electronic sounds by gesture remained incomplete. NuRoque had to wait.

Keith McMillen Instruments shipped its first product in 2008. Most recently, the company unveiled the StrongArm, a piece of guitar hardware that allows notes to sustain indefinitely. McMillen said that the tool took thirty-five years to make. McMillen’s products solve the problem posed to a young guitarist enraptured by Switched-On Bach, and strive to defy the limitations he’s encountered since. Still, McMillen predicts that when his inventions allow enough expression, sound, and practicality, he’ll stop building. “I basically told myself that once I was done with all of these instruments,” he said. “I’d return to making music.”

The earth did quake; the rocks rent, and the graves were opened. Then peace was made with God as Jesus’s body came to rest. That peace, and with it the ability to notice beauty in all things, is expressed in the last aria of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) which begins with the text, “Make thyself clean, my heart.”

This aria is among the most sublime gifts given in all of music, a vision far better suited for the soul than the stage. Yet Peter Brook tailors it meticulously to The Suit. The 89-year-old British director’s production of a short play based on a story by South African novelist Can Themba ends with this astonishing aria plucked out on dinky electric keyboard rather than sung as though musical lava profoundly pouring from a deep bass. Brook has no pretense to present Bach as a call to hope on a cosmic, landscape-altering scale. It is enough that we carefully sustain beauty in the atmosphere of tragedy.

The latest production from Brook’s French company, Thèâtre des Bouffes du Nord, has arrived in Los Angeles. Under the auspices of Center for Performance at UCLA, The Suit is currently finishing up a two-year international tour and will run through 19 April 2014 at Freud Playhouse. A simple show, it employs only three actors, three musicians and a few basic stage properties, such as chairs and clothes racks.

Philemon (Ivanno Jeremiah) discovers his wife, Matilda (Nonhlanhla Kheswa), in bed with another man. The lover flees, leaving his suit behind. The earth does not quake. There is no violence, no lack of civility. Philemon merely insists that the suit be treated as a guest of the house, a diplomatic reminder of his wife’s offense. Otherwise life goes on.

But life going on is no small thing. The setting for The Suit is the township of Sophiatown west of Johannesburg during apartheid. It wasn’t pretty and pink, Philemon’s friend, Maphikela (Jordan Barbour), tells us. But it was alive.

People lived ordinary lives, indulged in pleasures and tried not to think too hard about the oppression lurking around the corner, about the white police who took pleasure in cutting off the fingers, one by one, of a black guitarist before shooting him. They tried not to think about the fact that Sophiatown would soon be leveled and its residents relocated to a camp.

Brook lets the story tell itself. These are gracious characters, enormously appealing. But humiliation is discretely poisoning the atmosphere.

The play has the quality of a twentieth-century South African Othello. In Shakespeare, jealously is like an unsubtle Newtonian force, namely explosive. A Moor stands apart and is unable to control his emotions. There is clear-cut black and white. Iago, who taunts Othello, is all bad. In Sophiatown, white suppresses black. But Themba’s story – as adapted by Brook, Marie-Hèléne Estienne and composer Franck Krawczyk – is of blacks. Maphikela is not Iago. He reluctantly tells Philemon of the adultery and encourages Philemon to forgive and forget. Philemon does not mean to kill Matilda, on whom he dotes. But humiliation has a terrible power, and every gracious gesture on stage is the unspoken (though not unsung) reminder that this township is victim of the terrible humiliation of apartheid.

What makes The Suit exceptional theater is the sheer graciousness of those gestures. Every actor moves like a dancer. Every actor speakers like singer. And song pervades all. Pianist and accordionist Mark Christine, trumpet player Mark Kavuma and guitarist Arthur Astier underscore the production with arrangements of Schubert songs, South African songs, African American blues, The Blue Danube and, of course, Bach.

The music mainly serenades. Schubert’s Death and the Maiden may not be a subtle indicator but, heard played by a wandering accordionist, it is easy to ignore its significance. And that is the brilliance of The Suit. Brook has long been streamlining theater and opera, breaking down the distinctions between the narrative and the lyric stage. Movement is, for Brook, a purifying process. Music and speech only have meaning if movement does.

Three years ago, also with the help of Estienne and Krawczyk, Brook reduced Mozart’s The Magic Flute down to its ritualistic essences, removing the magic and retaining the humanity. In The Suit, however, the horrors won’t go away. But by making theater, music and dance inseparably one, Brook’s art reaches that cleansing Bachian peak where beauty and humanity endure.

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) is contemplative, a study in suffering and transcendence. His St. John Passion (BWV 245) is tighter and more angular, a battlefield of action and reaction.

Matthew weeps and wonders while John, which the Berlin Philharmonic and its conductor, Simon Rattle, performed [last week] in a powerful new staging by Peter Sellars at the Philharmonie [in Berlin], presses forward. Matthew is a mass, John an opera.

But not quite. While our sense of Bach has deepened as scholars have learned more about the key role opera played in the world he inhabited, he chose never to write in the genre. It seems there was something he resisted about a form whose audience consumed art passively.

He created works, the Passions most of all, whose viewers are also, in a sense, participants, constantly questioning themselves and their perspective. For instance, the chorus enacting a mob of persecutors suddenly transforms into a huddled band of mourners.

In his 2010 staging of the St. Matthew Passion, Mr. Sellars showed a keen understanding of the status of these works as rituals rather than operas. It was a spare, haunting production that consisted physically of little more than dark clothes, simple gestures and some white blocks. The emphasis was on intense emotion and human connection, with close interaction between the instrumentalists and singers.

The follow-up, Mr. Sellars’s St. John Passion, has been eagerly anticipated. Granted a luxurious amount of rehearsal and a nearly intact cast from the Matthew performances – only the great bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff is missing, and missed, having announced his retirement in 2012 – the simmering performance lives up to the high expectations.

Mr. Sellars’s touching stylization was better suited to the grief-stricken Matthew than the more stoic John, and the physical relationship he created between the orchestra and the other performers was more meaningful in that earlier production. But in John, he still created potent effects, pushing his soloists toward focused melancholy. He made the Berlin Radio Choir sprawl on the stage, crawl across it as a mass and, at one point, race to the corners of the Philharmonie to create a chilling sense of sonic immersion.

Visually there is even less to Mr. Sellars’s St. John Passion than his Matthew. The choral and instrumental forces of John are smaller, so the teeming feeling of the previous production is poignantly depleted. In lieu of the white blocks, there is just a hanging spotlight hovering a few feet above the center of the stage and, sometimes, a chair. The lighting changes starkly with each abrupt shift of mood.

Like the St. Matthew Passion, John tells the story of the end of Jesus’s life by an alternation of three elements: a dramatization in recitative of the biblical text, hymn-like chorales and reflective arias. But Mr. Sellars focuses intently in this John on the first of these, making truly central the three singers who voice Jesus, Peter/Pilate and, especially, the narrating Evangelist.

The Philharmonic was lucky to have once more the tenor Mark Padmore, one of the great Evangelists of our time, and superb here. A wandering witness to terrible events he helplessly recalls, he is a cousin of the shellshocked Captain Vere he portrayed in Britten’s Billy Budd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music a few weeks ago.

It seems reductive to pick out specific moments, like the sensitivity with which he described Peter warming himself, the majestic way he unfurled the word “weinete” (“wept”) or his soaring line after Jesus declares Pilate powerless. From his first word – “Jesus,” a microcosm of caring – Mr. Padmore’s performance was an integrated, unforgettable vocal and dramatic whole.

The baritone Roderick Williams’s voice rang out commandingly beneath a blindfold as Jesus, but it was a questionable choice to have him collapse at the chorus’s cries of “kreuzige” (“crucify”). The Jesus of the St. John Passion is not the suffering martyr of Matthew but calm and collected, a winner. We may identify less today with his confident reserve, but the contrast of that coolness with the others’ hysteria and pain gives the work meaning.

Contemporary audiences may feel more of a connection to the tormented Pilate, whom the thoughtful baritone Christian Gerhaher and Mr. Sellars have rendered as a well-meaning, weak-willed bourgeois functionary. Dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt open at the neck, he may be a lawyer or banker whose power derives from a structure that prevents him from doing good. His question to Jesus – “was ist Wahrheit?” (“what is truth?”) – was here a stunned expression of existential emptiness.

The soloists in the arias were less devastating. Magdalena Kožená’s soft-grained mezzo-soprano suited the earth-mother role she seemed to embody, with her thickly woven red gown and very obvious pregnancy. The soprano Camilla Tilling sounded committed, light and creamy, only turning tense at the very top of the voice. The only disappointment was the tenor Topi Lehtipuu, colorless and strained in his important arias.

Mr. Rattle conducted a performance that was lush yet energetic from the first downbeat, with warm balance between the strings and the winds. The sharp edge of the violins faced the ominous buzz of the bassoon as the chorus denied it had the ability to put Jesus to death, and the flute soloists were velvety in the aria Ich folge dir. The continuo players, who accompanied the recitatives, were dazzlingly unified with the singers in moments like Jesus’s declaration that his kingdom does not belong to this world.

The chorus, led by Simon Halsey, was particularly affecting in slower music, when the singers came together in great waves. Other passages could have been less polite: the cries of “kreuzige” even more terrifying and the horrifyingly jovial account of rolling dice for the distribution of Jesus’s tunic more grotesque.

But the work’s final sequence – a long, somber chorus followed by a shining hymn – left me full of the feeling that John Eliot Gardiner, in his recent study Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, writes is one thing we have when the St. John Passion is over: a pained, uneasy gratitude.

Only one thing was on everyone’s mind at the Leacock Theatre [at Mount Royal University in Calgary] on 25 January 2014, and that was Paul O’Dette’s programming of a generous helping of Bach’s lute works. Originally written for the lautenwerk, a keyboard instrument (and a curiosity even in its day) made with gut strings instead of metal, it could emulate a lute so exactly when played that it even fooled experts who listened to it in an adjoining room. Bach owned two of the instruments, and even though copies have been built so as to duplicate their sound, the music left behind for the lautenwerk still poses a problem – how do we play these keyboard masterpieces for their authentically-intended sound world, namely, the lute?

Bach’s lute works have historically presented many problems for transcribers and performers, whether for guitar or for baroque thirteen-course lute, but this night, Mr. O’Dette showed that he had no problems at all adapting to the challenges posed by this very difficult repertoire. The greatest living lutenist, arguably, and certainly the most recorded of all time, gave a recital for the ages, and left us all with an incomparable musical experience of such high quality we could never forget.

Restoring these works of Bach to the lute repertoire has been an ongoing process for some time now, and Mr. O’Dette has played an important part in that story. Furthermore, it was never an easy step to take these works to the level of guitar transcription either, and many of the audience members being guitarists at this jointly-hosted concert by the Calgary Bach Society and the Classical Guitar Society of Calgary showed tremendous interest in Mr. O’Dette’s polished transcriptional abilities and scintillating fingerwork skill.

Besides, the chance to hear Mr. O’Dette perform most anything at all, and to watch him as he artistically elicits a broad range of timbral tonal colors from his lute with unsurpassed musicality and transcendent technique was not to be missed.

The concert opened with the Suite in G minor (BWV 995), a transcription of the violoncello Suite in D minor (BWV 1008), but re-titled “Pieces pour la luth à Monsieur Schouster.” From the first few notes one is struck by the meticulousness of phrasing, particularly in the breathtaking fugue which was executed with uncommon and unstinting mastery over such difficult-to-play counterpoint. His Allemande was sensitively played – stately, slow, every small phrase accounted for, and every ornament and turn clean.

Mr. O’Dette’s sense of the dance is never lost, the rhythms played with an explorative ease, and gratifyingly, he let some of Bach’s more adventurous harmonies resonate a little longer for our enjoyment. In the Courante, Mr. O’Dette explored the broader range of rhetoric underlying the piece both rhythmically and in each phrase shape. He takes advantage of the intellectual abstractions offered by these highly stylized dance pieces at every point, particularly in the Sarabande, a movement now famous to us today for its somewhat existential qualities. Like so many movements of the Baroque dance suite which became stylized to such a point that they grew to become their own unique, artistically complex, musical identities, the works on this night’s program demonstrated how such works came to transcend the very rhythms and gestures for which these movements were originally written. It was entirely appropriate that Mr. O’Dette could convey a rich appreciation for the history and interpretation of these works and their intrinsic sophistication evinced through his manifestly astute playing of every note, every phrase and each color.

Next came the Partita in E Major (BWV 1006a), transcribed up a semi-tone and played in F, to accommodate the bassline. Absolutely hypnotic, lustrous, colored in ways I had never before heard, with fretwork skill that was truly outstanding, this is one of the toughest pieces to play on lute, from the point of view of virtuosity and skill alone. Yet the work is balanced throughout with quieter, genteel and often haunting moments of exquisite beauty, such as the Loure, a dance of subtler lilting demeanor, beautifully played by Mr. O’Dette. Always taking repeats, Mr. O’Dette adeptly showed a different timbral and Baroque character in every dance he played in this suite. The minuets have been taken slower on many recordings, but here, Mr. O’Dette is dedicated to a more authentic tempo in accordance with the speed at which these works would have been danced. The result was a nice narrative flow-through from Minuett I to II, with his handling of the Minuett II so moving, yet a little slower, never dragging, and with a premium paid entirely to the idiosyncratic beauty of Bach’s beautiful close harmonies. Mr. O’Dette’s interpretations of these dances underscores how these gallantries ought to be played – with intimacy, meditatively, even for private enjoyment. With these small pearls, Mr. O’Dette seemed to achieve the rarest of feats in concert performance, and that was to transcend the spacious hall of the Leacock Theatre and speak to us one by one as though playing to us in a private salon, respecting the original performing intent of these finely-crafted works.

The night only got better. Programmed in the second half was the evening’s only work authentically written for the lute, namely Silvius Leopold Weiss’s Suite in C minor, the composer’s first work in the genre. Weiss, a close friend of Bach’s, was as noted an improviser in his day as the great organist, and there is every sense that the suites we heard in the first half of the concert were written in Weiss’s honor. Mr. O’Dette, who spoke familiarly and charmingly to his audience between every suite, extolled the work as a mature and idiomatically authentic example of a young composer who had truly found his creative voice with his instrument. And certainly the work was played that way, with contrasts of strong accents measured with tender beauty. This has long been a favorite lute work of mine, and to hear it played live for the first time, and so well, was a real treat.

To conclude, Mr. O’Dette turned to another difficult work by Bach, the Italian-styled Sonata in G minor (BWV 1001), originally written for violin.

By leaving the G minor sonata for the end with its famous, monstrous fugue that is so difficult to execute, Mr. O’Dette saved the best for last. Navigated with true facility and always contrapuntally clear, this work was played with outstandingly uncommon expression. Usually lutenists and guitarists merely try to survive this work and get to the end intact, but for Mr. O’Dette, expression counted for everything, and this was by far the most impressive work that he played all evening. The final Gigue was spun forth from his lute with such considerable alacrity that its performance was impossible to rival on any artistic level.

For his encore, to send us into the night, Mr. O’Dette chose the Largo from the violin Sonata in C Major (BWV 1005), which he played with such sincerity and beauty, none of us likely would have left had he elected to play all night. He continued his entrancing hold over us, never missing any of Bach’s harmonic twists and turns along the way, giving each its due, and then more. It was worth every moment to hear Mr. O’Dette light up the room with one more resonant chord held for all its worth, one more graceful gesture, one more moment of refined beauty, the like of which in the hands of such a master, we are unlikely to ever hear again.

Underpinning so much of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s approach to Bach is identifying the provenance and essence of dramatic character, “mutant opera” (as Gardiner calls it) found in genres – like the motet – which are not enacted but depend on perceptive rhetorical judgement within a fabric of rolling continuity. Bach’s motets may pay homage to forebears in scale, tone and technique but each one, especially revealed in this vibrant and questing new set, presses for fresh meaning with all the virtuoso means Bach could muster.

The motets have appeared as pillars of the Monteverdi Choir’s existence over five decades, punctuated by a notable recording for Erato in the early 1980s and most recently within selected programs during the millennial Cantata Pilgrimage. For Gardiner, these works represent an endlessly fascinating tapestry of discovery which will doubtless continue to evolve, a body enhanced by the addition of Ich lasse dich nicht (BWV Anh. 159) – a short motet once thought to have been by Bach’s great elder cousin, Johann Christoph, but now considered the work of the Young Turk.

Common to the Monteverdi Choir’s performances over the years are their inimitable textual projection, clarity of line, rhythmic rigor and an overriding sense of expectancy and flair, just occasionally slipping a little too eagerly into exaggerated gesture. Gardiner asks for more pinpoint delicacy, quicksilver contrast and lightness than ever and illuminatingly inward da camera dialoguing between voices. For all the pages of sprung bravura and purpose, especially in Lobet den Herrn (BWV 230) and Singet dem Herrn (BWV 225), there are as many periods of elongated and poignant restraint.

There is no more compelling example than the soft, controlled climate of the final contemplative strains of Fürchte dich nicht (BWV 228), where we have an extraordinary representation of the precious mystery of belonging to Christ. The soprano motif on “und dein Blut, mir zugut” (‘”thy life and thy blood”) is uttered with such sustained and ritualized other-worldliness (track 15, 5’38”) that the risk of disembodiment is only allayed by the Monteverdi Choir’s captivating certainty of line as the devoted soul drifts heavenwards.

One of the most striking features in this new collection, as I mentioned previously, is how attentive Gardiner is to the individuality of each of the motets. This might seem a time-honored ambition and yet, for all the admirable qualities of, say, the RIAS Kammerchor under René Jacobs or the more recent reading from Philippe Herreweghe and Collegium Vocale Gent, neither of these brings as ambitious a kaleidoscopic challenge to the listener in identifying renewed character and meaning as Gardiner aspires to. Indeed, Herreweghe recently went as far as to say that “a groundbreaking reading is not necessary.”

Gardiner would disagree. How lucidly Der Geist hilft (BWV 226), that short but compact work written for the funeral of Ernesti, the old Rector of St Thomas’s, in 1729, sets out to reflect the infirmities of man gradually imbued with the intercessions of the Holy Spirit. Here we have something more perspicacious than merely good pacing: the Monteverdi singers narrate this play of uncertainty and the growing anticipation of understanding God’s will with such corporate and dynamic purpose that, even when the two choirs converge in an affirming four-part double fugue, we never feel quite out of the woods. The tantalizing prospect of salvation is only truly satisfied at the final cadence of a luminously directed chorale.

Some of these interpretative risks may not suit those who prefer a less articulated, more abstract, soft-edged and generally expansive landscape. Singet dem Herrn is typically exuberant in its outer “concerti,” but the unique double-choir juxtaposition of chorale and free contrapuntal “rhapsody” could perhaps have yielded more genuine contemplative warmth. Indeed, Gardiner rarely delivers a comfortable ride and yet what brilliant visions emerge, most strikingly in the central work, the five-part Jesu meine Freude (BWV 227), riding – literally – the storm of the love of the flesh, Satan, the old dragon and death.

Throughout this masterpiece, terrifying, quasi-“turba” (crowd) scenes are viscerally offset against an ethereal quest for redemption. “Es ist nun nichts Verdammliches” (“There is now no condemnation”) has surely never enjoyed such a mesmerizing volley of declamation and rich illusion over a short space as Gardiner summons, while “Trotz dem alten Drachen” (“Despite the old dragon”) spits out its irascible consonances only to be disarmingly defied by the elevated purity of “in gar sichrer Ruh” (“in confident tranquility”) – all this in contrasting tableaux of ever-surprising emotional impact. If the listener is often left gasping, this is caused not only by vocal singularity of purpose but by the discreet and graphic responsiveness of the instrumental continuo players, among whom the bassoon here and in Komm, Jesu, komm! (BWV 229) contributes with knowing effect.

As you would imagine, surprises abound – some of which take a little getting used to. Gardiner challenges orthodoxy in how these a cappella holy grails are fundamentally signposted and he does so, almost always, with persuasive passion and genuine zeal. High-wire artist Philippe Petit is a fitting cover image to this important landmark in highly recommended, high-stakes performances.